From A.E. Farstrup & S. Jay Samuels (Eds.), What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction 
(3rd ed.).  2002 by the International Reading Association. 

Chapter 10 

Effective Practices for Developing 
Reading Comprehension 

Nell K. Duke and P. David Pearson 

R
R
eading comprehension research has a long and rich history. There 
is much that we can say about both the nature of reading comprehension 
as a process and about effective reading comprehension instruction. 
Most of what we know has been learned since 1975. Why have 
we been able to make so much progress so fast? We believe that part of 
the reason behind this steep learning curve has been the lack of controversy 
about teaching comprehension. Unlike decoding, oral reading, and 
reading readiness, those who study reading comprehension instruction 
have avoided much of the acrimony characteristic of work in other aspects 
of reading. 

As it should be, much work on the process of reading comprehension 
has been grounded in studies of good readers. We know a great deal 
about what good readers do when they read: 

 Good readers are active readers. 
 From the outset they have clear goals in mind for their reading. 
They constantly evaluate whether the text, and their reading of it, 
is meeting their goals. 
 Good readers typically look over the text before they read, noting 
such things as the structure of the text and text sections that might 
be most relevant to their reading goals. 
 As they read, good readers frequently make predictions about what 
is to come. 
 They read selectively,continually making decisions about their reading 
what to read carefully, what to read quickly, what not to read, what 
to reread, and so on. 
 Good readers construct, revise, and question the meanings they make 
as they read. 
205 


 Good readers try to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words and 
concepts in the text, and they deal with inconsistencies or gaps as 
needed. 
 They draw from, compare, and integrate their prior knowledge with 
material in the text. 
 They think about the authors of the text, their style, beliefs, intentions, 
historical milieu, and so on. 
 They monitor their understanding of the text, making adjustments in 
their reading as necessary. 
 They evaluate the texts quality and value, and react to the text in a 
range of ways, both intellectually and emotionally. 
 Good readers read different kinds of text differently. 
 When reading narrative, good readers attend closely to the setting 
and characters. 
 When reading expository text, these readers frequently construct 
and revise summaries of what they have read. 
 For good readers, text processing occurs not only during reading 
as we have traditionally defined it, but also during short breaks 
taken during reading, even after the reading itself has commenced, 
even after the reading has ceased. 
 Comprehension is a consuming, continuous, and complex activity, 
but one that, for good readers, is both satisfying and productive. 
(See Pressley and Afflerbach [1995] and Block and Pressley [2001] for reviews 
of much of the research on good readers comprehension. The intellectual 
ancestor to this chapter is Developing Expertise in Reading 
Comprehension [Pearson, Roehler, Dole, & Duffy, 1992] in the second 
edition of What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction;this piece 
also provides a good overview of the work upon which this characterization 
of good reading is based.) 

Given knowledge about what good readers do when they read, researchers 
and educators have addressed the following question: Can we 
teach students to engage in these productive behaviors? The answer is a 
resounding yes. A large volume of work indicates that we can help students 
acquire the strategies and processes used by good readersand 
that this improves their overall comprehension of text, both the texts 
used to teach the strategies and texts they read on their own in the future. 

206 Duke and Pearson 


In this chapter, we will describe some proven instructional techniques 
for helping students acquire productive comprehension skills and 
strategies. As you will see, there is a large if not overwhelming number 
and range of techniques that work, yet the use of even one technique 
alone has been shown to improve students comprehension. Teaching 
what we call collections or packages of comprehension strategies can 
help students become truly solid comprehenders of many kinds of text. 

Balanced Comprehension Instruction 

To borrow a term from the decoding debate, comprehension instruction 
should be balanced.By this we mean that good comprehension instruction 
includes both explicit instruction in specific comprehension strategies 
and a great deal of time and opportunity for actual reading, writing, 
and discussion of text. The components in our approach to balanced 
comprehension instruction are a supportive classroom context and a 
model of comprehension instruction. 

A Supportive Classroom Context 

It is not enough just to offer good instruction. Several important features 
of good reading instruction also need to be present. Otherwise, the comprehension 
instruction will not take hold and flourish. These features include 
the following: 

 A great deal of time spent actually reading.As with decoding, all the 
explicit instruction in the world will not make students strong readers 
unless it is accompanied by lots of experience applying their 
knowledge, skills, and strategies during actual reading. 
 Experience reading real texts for real reasons.To become strong, flexible, 
and devoted comprehenders of text, students need experience 
reading texts beyond those designed solely for reading instruction, 
as well as experience reading text with a clear and compelling purpose 
in mind. 
 Experience reading the range of text genres that we wish students to 
comprehend.Students will not learn to become excellent comprehenders 
of any given type of text without substantial experience 
reading and writing it. For example, experience reading storybooks 
will not, by itself, enable a student to read, understand, and critique 
procedural forms of text of the sort found in how-to books, 
instruction manuals, and the like. 
Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 207 


 An environment rich in vocabulary and concept development through 
reading, experience, and, above all, discussion of words and their 
meanings.Any text comprehension depends on some relevant prior 
knowledge. To some degree, well-chosen texts can, in themselves, 
build readers knowledge base. At the same time, hands-on activities, 
excursions, conversations, and other experiences are also 
needed to develop vocabulary and concept knowledge required to 
understand a given text. 
 Substantial facility in the accurate and automatic decoding of words. 
In a recent review of the literature, Pressley (2000) argues compellingly 
that skilled decoding is necessary, although by no means 
sufficient, for skilled comprehension. 
 Lots of time spent writing texts for others to comprehend.Again, students 
should experience writing the range of genres we wish them 
to be able to comprehend. Their instruction should emphasize connections 
between reading and writing, developing students abilities 
to write like a reader and read like a writer. 
 An environment rich in high-quality talk about text.This should involve 
both teacher-to-student and student-to-student talk. It should 
include discussions of text processing at a number of levels, from 
clarifying basic material stated in the text to drawing interpretations 
of text material to relating the text to other texts, experiences, and 
reading goals. 
A Model of Comprehension Instruction 

The model of comprehension instruction we believe is best supported by 
research does more than simply include instruction in specific comprehension 
strategies and opportunities to read, write, and discuss texts 
it connects and integrates these different learning opportunities. 
Specifically, we suggest an instructional model including the following 
five components: 

1. An explicit description of the strategy and when and how it should 
be used.Predicting is making guesses about what will come next in 
the text you are reading. You should make predictions a lot when 
you read. For now, you should stop every two pages that you read 
and make some predictions. 
2. Teacher and/or student modeling of the strategy in action.I am going 
to make predictions while I read this book. I will start with just the 
208 Duke and Pearson 


cover here. Hmm...I see a picture of an owl. It looks like heI think 
it is a heis wearing pajamas, and he is carrying a candle. I predict 
that this is going to be a make-believe story because owls do not 
really wear pajamas and carry candles. I predict it is going to be 
about this owl, and it is going to take place at nighttime. 


The title will give me more clues about the book; the title is 
Owl at Home.So this makes me think even more that this book is 
going to be about the owl. He will probably be the main character. 
And it will take place in his house. 


Okay, I have made some predictions about the book based on 
the cover. Now I am going to open up the book and begin reading. 


3. Collaborative use of the strategy in action. I have made some good 
predictions so far in the book. From this part on I want you to 
make predictions with me. Each of us should stop and think about 
what might happen next.... Okay, now lets hear what you think 
and why.... 
4. Guided practice using the strategy with gradual release of responsibility. 
Early on... 
I have called the three of you together to work on making predictions 
while you read this and other books. After every few pages 
I will ask each of you to stop and make a prediction. We will talk 
about your predictions and then read on to see if they come true. 

Later on... 
Each of you has a chart that lists different pages in your book. 
When you finish reading a page on the list, stop and make a prediction. 
Write the prediction in the column that says Prediction. 
When you get to the next page on the list, check off whether your 
prediction Happened, Will not happen, or Still might happen. 
Then make another prediction and write it down. (This is based 
on the Reading Forecaster Technique from Mason and Au [1986] 
described and cited in Lipson and Wixson [1991].) 


5. Independent use of the strategy.It is time for silent reading. As you 
read today, remember what we have been working onmaking 
predictions while we read. Be sure to make predictions every two 
or three pages. Ask yourself why you made the prediction you 
didwhat made you think that. Check as you read to see whether 
Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 209 


your prediction came true. Jamal is passing out Predictions! bookmarks 
to remind you. 

Throughout these five phases, it is important that neither the teacher 
nor the students lose sight of the need to coordinate or orchestrate comprehension 
strategies. Strategies are not to be used singlygood readers 
do not read a book and only make predictions. Rather, good readers use 
multiple strategies constantly. Although the above model foregrounds a 
particular strategy at a particular time, other strategies should also be referenced, 
modeled, and encouraged throughout the process. A way of conceptualizing 
the orchestration process is captured in a classic visual model 
from Pearson and Gallaghers (1983) early work on comprehension instruction. 
In that model (see Figure 10.1), teachers move from a situation 
in which they assume all the responsibility for performing a task 

Figure 10.1. Gradual release of responsibility 

Percent of Task Responsibility Assumed by the Teacher 
0 Percent of Task Responsibility Assumed by the Student 100 
Primarily Teacher 
Modeling* 
Guided PracticeDirect 
Instruction* 
Region of Shared Responsibility 
Participating*
Scaffolding* 
Facilitating* 
Primarily 
Student 
100 

0 

As one moves down the diagonal from upper left to lower right, students assume more, and 
teachers less, responsibility for task completion. There are three regions of responsibility: 
primarily teacher in the upper left corner, primarily student in the lower right, and shared 
responsibility in the center. (This figure is adapted with permission from Pearson and Gallagher 
[1983]; the asterisked terms are borrowed from Au & Raphael [1998].) 

210 Duke and Pearson 


while the student assumes none, which we would call modeling or 
demonstrating a strategy (the upper left corner), to a situation in which 
the students assume all the responsibility while the teacher assumes none, 
which we would call independent strategy use (lower right corner), a situation 
in which teachers can shift to a participation mode, performing 
tasks in much the same way as any other group member. Instruction in 
the upper left corner would be labeled teacher centered, whereas instruction 
in the lower right would be student centered. 

Other Teaching Considerations 

Choosing well-suited texts. Another important role for the teacher in 
implementing this model is in choosing the texts to use. At least some of 
the texts used during these different phases of comprehension instruction 
should be chosen to be particularly well suited to application of the specific 
strategy being learned. Just as many have recommended using texts 
in decoding instruction that emphasizes the particular sound-letter relationships 
students are learning, we recommend linking closely the comprehension 
strategy being taught to the texts to which it is initially applied 
and practiced. For example, a good text for learning about the prediction 
strategy would be one that students have not read before (hence, they 
would not already know what happens next), that has a sequence of 
events, and that provides sufficient clues about upcoming events for the 
reader to make informed predictions about them. Also, as is recommended 
for decoding instruction, we recommend careful attention to the 
level and demands of texts used in different phases of instruction, especially 
the early phases. When students are first learning a comprehension 
strategy, they should encounter texts that do not make heavy demands 
in other respects, such as background knowledge, vocabulary load, or 
decoding. Later, of course, students must be asked to apply the strategy to 
the range of texts they will meet during everyday readingin reading/ 
language arts, in content area classes (i.e., social studies, science, and 
mathematics), and on their own. 

Concern with student motivation. The level of motivation students bring 
to a task impacts whether and how they will use comprehension strategies 
(Dole, Brown, & Trathen, 1996; Guthrie et al., 1996). Therefore, the 
model we suggest, in particular the independent practice portion, should 
be made as motivating to students as possible. Accompaniments to comprehension 
instruction we have already notedsuch as providing 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 211 


experience reading real texts for real reasons and creating an environment 
rich in high-quality talk about textwill undoubtedly help. Other 
strategies can be found in books, articles, and chapters devoted specifically 
to the topic of motivation and engagement (e.g., Guthrie & 
Wigfield, 1997). 

Ongoing assessment. Finally, as with any good instruction, comprehension 
instruction should be accompanied by ongoing assessment. 
Teachers should monitor students use of comprehension strategies and 
their success at understanding what they read. Results of this monitoring 
should, in turn, inform the teachers instruction. When a particular 
strategy continues to be used ineffectively, or not at all, the teacher 
should respond with additional instruction or a modified instructional 
approach. At the same time, students should be monitoring their own 
use of comprehension strategies, aware of their strengths as well as their 
weaknesses as developing comprehenders. 

Building a Comprehension Curriculum 

With this overall model for comprehension instruction as a background 
to be used in teaching any useful strategy, we now turn to specific comprehension 
strategies that research has shown to be effective in improving 
students comprehension of text. These are the strategies we 
recommend explaining and modeling for students and then emphasizing 
in shared, guided, and independent reading. The effectiveness of 
these strategies is not limited to a particular age group. Age groups used 
in studies consulted for this review range from kindergarten through 
college level. Certainly not every strategy presented has been tested for 
this entire range of age groups, but neither is there substantial evidence 
to indicate that any strategy is inappropriate for any age range. First, we 
introduce six important strategies, and then we review some routines 
that actually integrate several strategies in a single activity. 

Effective Individual Comprehension Strategies 

Prediction. We have labeled the first strategy prediction, although it is 
better conceived as a family of strategies than a single, identifiable strategy. 
At its core is making predictions and then reading to see how they 
turned out, but it also entails activities that come with different labels, 
such as activating prior knowledge, previewing, and overviewing. What 

212 Duke and Pearson 


all these variants have in common is encouraging students to use their 
existing knowledge to facilitate their understanding of new ideas encountered 
in text. Although these strategies have some earlier roots (e.g., 
Ausabel, 1968; Stauffer, 1976, 1980), these activities are most clearly the 
legacy of the 1980s, with its emphasis on schema theory (Anderson & 
Pearson, 1984) and comprehension as the bridge between the known 
and the new (Pearson & Johnson, 1978). 

Although it might seem reasonable to expect research on prediction 
and prior knowledge activation to be equally distributed across narrative 
and expository text genres, it is decidedly biased toward narrative texts 
(see Pearson & Fielding, 1991). Two activities dominate the work: making 
predictions and activating prior knowledge about story theme, content, 
or structure. Hansens work (Hansen, 1981; Hansen & Pearson, 
1983) provides rich examples of prior knowledge activation. In both 
instances, students were encouraged to generate expectations about what 
characters might do based on their own experiences in similar situations. 
This technique led to superior comprehension of the stories in which the 
activity was embedded and to superior performance for younger and less 
able older readers on new stories that the students read without any 
teacher support. Working with fourth-grade students, Neuman (1988) 
found that when teachers presented students with oral previews of stories, 
which were then turned into discussions and predictions, story 
comprehension increased relative to read only previews and typical 
basal background-building lessons. In a creative variation of the preview 
theme, McGinley and Denner (1987) had students compose very short 
narratives based on a list of keywords from the upcoming story. For example, 
terms such as loose tooth, string, pain, baseball game, tie score, 
and home run might serve as keywords for an upcoming story about a 
girl who has a loose tooth that will not come out but falls out naturally 
when she is engrossed in a close ballgame. Interestingly, the accuracy of 
their prediction stories proved relatively unimportant in explaining 
subsequent comprehension of the real stories; apparently, it was the engagement 
itself that triggered the deeper story comprehension. 

Explicit attempts to get students to engage in prediction behaviors 
have proved successful in increasing interest in and memory for stories 
(Anderson, Wilkinson, Mason, & Shirey, 1987). Fielding, Anderson, and 
Pearson (1990) found that prediction activities promoted overall story 
understanding only if the predictions were explicitly compared to text 
ideas during further reading, suggesting that the verification process, in 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 213 


which knowledge and text are compared explicitly, may be as important 
as making the prediction. 

These studies suggest a variety of productive ways of encouraging 
students to engage their knowledge and experience prior to reading. 
They also suggest that in nearly all cases, the impact on story understanding 
is positive, at least for narrative texts in which themes and topics 
are likely to be highly familiar. The situation may be quite different 
in reading expository texts, especially if students existing knowledge is 
riddled with misconceptions about matters of science and prejudices in 
the realm of human experience (see, for example, Guzzetti, Snyder, 
Glass, & Gamas, 1993). 

Think-aloud. Another proven instructional technique for improving 
comprehension is think-aloud. As its name implies, think-aloud involves 
making ones thoughts audible and, usually, publicsaying what you are 
thinking while you are performing a task, in this case, reading. Think-
aloud has been shown to improve students comprehension both when 
students themselves engage in the practice during reading and also when 
teachers routinely think aloud while reading to students. 

Teacher think-aloud.Teacher think-aloud is typically conceived of as 
a form of teacher modeling. By thinking aloud, teachers demonstrate 
effective comprehension strategies and, at least as importantly, when and 
when not to apply them. For example, in the following teacher think-
aloud, the teacher demonstrates the use of visualization and prediction 
strategies: 

That night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and 
another.... Boy, I can really visualize Max. Hes in this monster suit and 
he is chasing after his dog with a fork in his hand. I think he is really 
starting to act crazy. I wonder what made Max act like that...Hm-m-
m...I bet he was getting a little bored and wanted to go on an adventure. 
I think that is my prediction. (Pressley et al., 1992, p. 518) 

Studies typically have not examined the effect of teacher think-aloud 
by itself, but rather as part of a package of reading comprehension strategies. 
Therefore, although we cannot infer directly that teacher think-
aloud is effective, it is clear that as part of a package, teacher think-aloud 
has been proven effective in a number of studies. For example, teacher 
think-aloud is part of the Informed Strategies for Learning (ISL) program 
(Paris, Cross, & Lipson, 1984), the reciprocal teaching approach (see later 

214 Duke and Pearson 


discussion), and the SAIL program (see later discussion), all of which 
have been shown to be effective at improving student comprehension. It 
is also an important part of the early modeling stages of instruction in 
many comprehension training routines, for example, the QAR work of 
Raphael and her colleagues (Raphael, Wonnacott, & Pearson, 1983) and 
the inference training work of Gordon and Pearson (1983). These studies 
suggest that teacher modeling is most effective when it is explicit, leaving 
the student to intuit or infer little about the strategy and its 
application, and flexible, adjusting strategy use to the text rather than presenting 
it as governed by rigid rules. Teacher think-aloud with these attributes 
is most likely to improve students comprehension of text. 

Student think-aloud.Instruction that entails students thinking aloud 
themselves also has proven effective at improving comprehension (see 
Kucan & Beck, 1997, for a review). A classic study by Bereiter and Bird 
(1985) showed that students who were asked to think aloud while reading 
had better comprehension than students who were not taught to 
think aloud, according to a question-and-answer comprehension test. 
A compelling study by Silven and Vauras (1992) demonstrated that students 
who were prompted to think aloud as part of their comprehension 
training were better at summarizing information in a text than students 
whose training did not include think-aloud. 

Several scholars have theorized about why student think-aloud is effective 
at improving comprehension. One popular theory is that getting 
students to think aloud decreases their impulsiveness (Meichebaum & 
Asnarow, 1979). Rather than jumping to conclusions about text meaning 
or moving ahead in the text without having sufficiently understood what 
had already been read, think-aloud may lead to more thoughtful, strategic 
reading. A study conducted with third-grade students provides some 
empirical support for this theory. Baumann and his colleagues found 
that training in think-aloud improved childrens ability to monitor their 
comprehension while reading (Baumann, Seifert-Kessel, & Jones, 1992). 
Third-grade children trained to think aloud as they used several comprehension 
strategies were better than a comparison group at detecting 
errors in passages, responding to a questionnaire about comprehension 
monitoring, and completing cloze items. One student trained in think-
aloud explained, When I read I think,is this making sense? I might...ask 
questions about the story and reread or retell the story (Baumann et al., 

p. 159). This and other student comments suggested a thoughtful, strategic 
approach to reading through think-aloud. 
Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 215 


Text structure. Beginning in the late 1970s and extending throughout 
the 1980s into the early 1990s, we witnessed an explosion of research 
about the efficacy of teaching children to use the structure of texts, both 
narrative and expository, to organize their understanding and recall of 
important ideas. Most of the research emphasized the structural aspects 
of text organization rather than the substance of the ideas, the logic being 
that it was structure, not content, that would transfer to new texts 
that students would meet on their own. 

Story structure.The research on story structure uses a few consistent 
heuristics to help students organize their story understanding and recall. 
Usually, these are organized into a story grammar (see Mandler, 1978; 
Stein & Glenn, 1979), or as it is commonly called in instructional parlance, 
a story map (see Pearson, 1981), which includes categories such as 
setting, problem, goal, action, outcome, resolution, and theme. 
Instruction typically consists of modeling, guided practice, and independent 
practice in recognizing parts of the stories under discussion that 
instantiate, or fill, each category. Although there are situations, texts, 
and populations in which this sort of instruction does not appear helpful, 
in the main, story structure instruction shows positive effects for a 
wide range of students, from kindergarten (Morrow, 1984a, 1984b) to 
the intermediate grades (Gordon & Pearson, 1983; Nolte & Singer, 1985) 
to high school (Singer & Donlan, 1982) to special populations (Idol, 
1987), and to students identified as struggling readers (Fitzgerald & 
Spiegel, 1983). Regarding transfer, although the effects are complex and 
sometimes subtle, it appears the effects are most stable for the texts in 
which the instruction has been embedded (Singer & Donlan, 1982), 
and they do transfer to new, independently read texts (Gordon & 
Pearson, 1983; Greenewald & Rossing, 1986). 

Informational text structure.Most of the research establishing the positive 
impact of helping students learn to use the structural features of informational 
texts as aides to understanding and recall has been conducted 
since the appearance of elaborate text analysis schemes in the late 1970s 
(e.g., Kintsch & Van Dijk, 1978; Meyer, 1975; see also Meyer & Rice, 1984, 
for a complete review of this early work). The early work documented the 
significance of attention to text structure, pointing out that studentsfor 
whatever reasons, including the fact that they are simply better readers 
who are more knowledgeable about text structure recall more textual 
information than those who are less knowledgeable (Bartlett, 1978; 
Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980). The work also suggested that knowledge is 

216 Duke and Pearson 


not enough. Students must actually follow the texts structure in building 
their recall for the effect to be realized; not surprisingly, more good 
than poor readers are inclined to do so (Bartlett, 1978; Taylor, 1980). 

The approaches to teaching text structure have exhibited substantial 
variability, beginning with general attempts to sensitize students to 
structural elements (e.g., Bartlett, 1978; Davis, Lange, & Samuels, 1988; 
Slater, Graves, & Piche, 1985) and extending to hierarchical summaries 
of key ideas (e.g., Taylor & Beach, 1984) and to visual representations of 
key ideas, such as conceptual maps, semantic networks, charts, and 
graphs (e.g., Armbruster & Anderson, 1980; Armbruster, Anderson, & 
Ostertag, 1987; Gallagher & Pearson, 1989; Geva, 1983; Holley & 
Dansereau, 1984). In general, the research suggests that almost any approach 
to teaching the structure of informational text improves both 
comprehension and recall of key text information. One plausible explanation 
is that systematic attention to the underlying organization, 
whether intended by the authors of texts or not, helps students relate 
ideas to one another in ways that make them more understandable and 
more memorable. Another plausible explanation is that it is actually 
knowledge of the content, not facility with text structure, that children 
acquire when they attend to the structural features of text. In other 
words, text structure is nothing more than an alias for the underlying 
structure of knowledge in that domain. 

Only a few of the studies in this area have evaluated these competing 
hypotheses. The results of the Gallagher and Pearson (1989) work suggest 
that both content and structural features contribute to the salutary effects 
of text structure instruction. Over a series of several weeks, Gallagher 
and Pearson taught fourth-grade students, mainly poor readers, to apply 
a consistent structural framework, instantiated as a set of matrix charts 
and flowcharts, to their reading and discussion of short books about different 
social insects (ants, bees, and termites). The outcome measures 
included several independently read passages, each passage successively 
more distant from the original social insect books. They read, in order, a 
passage about a fourth social insect, the paper wasp, a passage about a human 
society, and a passage about geographic formations such as gulfs, 
capes, peninsulas, and the like. As the conceptual distance between the 
original set of books and the testing passages increased, the effect of the 
intervention (compared with a group who read the same texts and 
answered questions and with a group that only read the texts) decreased in 
magnitude, but was still statistically significant, suggesting that students 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 217 


were learning something about (a) insect societies, (b) social organization 
in general, and (c) how to unearth the structure of an informational 
text. From a classroom teachers perspective, there is some comfort in 
knowing that content knowledge and text structure are naturally intertwined; 
after all, either or both represent legitimate curricular goals. 

Visual representations of text. There is an old saying that a picture is 
worth a thousand words. When it comes to comprehension, this saying 
might be paraphrased, a visual display helps readers understand, organize, 
and remember some of those thousand words. Compare the 
short text on digestion to the flow chart in Figure 10.2. The text is verbal, 
abstract, and eminently forgettable; by contrast, the flowchart is visual, 
concrete, and arguably more memorable. 

Figure 10.2. Text versus visual representation 

Text describing the digestive process: 

When you eat, you use your teeth to break food apart into tiny particles. These pieces 
mix with saliva to become a kind of mush. When you swallow, the food goes through a 
tube into your stomach, where it is digested. During digestion, your body breaks down 
the food into smaller and smaller bits. The food contains things your body needs, 
which we call nutrients. As the food passes from the stomach into the intestine, the 
nutrients pass through the walls of intestine into your bloodstream. Your bloodstream 
carries these nutrients to all parts of your body. The part of the food that is not 
digested, which we call waste, passes out of the body through the intestine. 

Flowchart of the digestive process: 

Food 
enters 
mouth 
Teeth 
break 
food into 
small bits 
Food is broken 
down even 
more in the 
stomach, creating 
nutrients and 
waste 
Nutrients pass through 
intestine wall into 
bloodstream and then 
to the entire body 
Waste passes out of 
body through intestine 
Swallow and 
food travels 
through tube 
into stomach 
. . 
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That said, we readily admit that when it comes to the use of visual 
representations of text, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to specify exactly 
what it is that students attend to and learn when teachers use them 
as heuristic devices to aid in comprehension and recall. The ubiquitous 
use of semantic maps and webs reveals this ambiguity. Consider, for example, 
the web in Figure 10.3. 

This could be a graphic summary of an article about coyotes. Or, it 
could be a map of an individuals (or a whole classs collective) knowledge 
about coyotes. Or, it could be a heuristic device used by a teacher to teach 
key vocabulary in a unit on scavenging animals. In a practical sense, as we 
pointed out in discussing text structure instruction, it does not really 
matter. To the contrary, we would expect tools and activities that improve 
comprehension to also enhance knowledge of text structure and vocabulary 
acquisition. The point about visual representations is that they are 
re-presentations; literally, they allow us to present information again.It 
is through that active, transformative process that knowledge, comprehension, 
and memory form a synergistic relationshipwhatever improves 
one of these elements also improves the others. 

Much of the research cited in the previous section on text structure 
applies to the use of visual displays. Most notable, because of their 

Figure 10.3. A semantic map of the concept, coyotes 

Famous 
Coyotes 
Relatives 
Habitats 
Food 
Natural 
Enemies 
Ways to 
Harm Humans 
Ways to 
Help Humans 
Rodents 
GarbageThe Trickster 
Humans 
ForestsDeserts 
Cities 
Wolves 
Dogs 
HyenasCoyotes 
g g 
Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 219 


consistent use of visual displays over an extended time period, is the 
work of Armbruster, Anderson, and Ostertag (1987) and Gallagher and 
Pearson (1989). Armbruster and colleagues (1987) employed the heuristic 
of a general frame to assist students in learning from expository text. 
For example, in history, a conflict frame is useful in organizing many historical 
phenomena: One side wants X, the other wants Y, their desires 
collide in some sort of conflict (war, debate, political battle), and some 
sort of resolution, often tentative, is reached. In their approach to teaching 
frames, Armbruster and her colleagues (Armbruster et al., 1987; 
Armbruster, Anderson, & Meyer, 1990) have identified and successfully 
taught students, usually at the middle school level, to use several generic 
frames as tools for organizing what they are learning from their reading, 
among them frames for depicting conflicts, cause-effect relations, 
descriptions, explanations, and procedures. The effects in this work are 
usually quite dramatic in improving understanding and recall for the 
texts in which the instruction is embedded; transfer effects to new passages 
read without assistance or without the requirement that the frames 
be used is much less impressive. 

An exception to the transfer effect finding is the work of Gallagher 
and Pearson (1989), described earlier in conjunction with text structure 
instruction. Recall that although transfer decreased as a function of conceptual 
distance from the original information domain (insect societies), 
it was nonetheless significant even for passages on unrelated topics. 
What may be central in this sort of instruction, besides consistent and 
persistent guidance in how and why to use the visual displays, is direct 
involvement in constructing the visual display along with compelling 
feedback to the students in the form of evidence that the arduous effort 
involved in re-presenting information pays off in terms of learning and, 
in the case of older students, better grades. 

Summarization. Teaching students to summarize what they read is another 
way to improve their overall comprehension of text. Dole, Duffy, 
Roehler, and Pearson (1991) describe summarizing as follows: 

Often confused with determining importance, summarizing is a 
broader, more synthetic activity for which determining importance is a 
necessary, but not sufficient, condition. The ability to summarize information 
requires readers to sift through large units of text, differentiate 
important from unimportant ideas, and then synthesize those ideas 
and create a new coherent text that stands for, by substantive criteria, 

220 Duke and Pearson 


the original. This sounds difficult, and the research demonstrates that, 

in fact, it is. (p. 244) 

Indeed, most people with relevant experience will agree that summarizing 
is a difficult task for many children. Many children require instruction 
and practice in summarizing before they are able to produce good 
oral and written summaries of text. Interestingly, research suggests that 
instruction and practice in summarizing not only improves students 
ability to summarize text, but also their overall comprehension of text 
content. Thus, instruction in summarization can be considered to meet 
dual purposes: to improve students ability to summarize text and to improve 
their ability to comprehend text and recall. 

There are at least two major approaches to the teaching of summarization. 
In rule-governed approaches, students are taught to follow a set 
of step-by-step procedures to develop summaries. For example, McNeil 
and Donant (1982) teach the following rules, which draw from the work 
of Brown, Campione, and Day (1981) and Kintsch and Van Dijk (1978): 

Rule 1: Delete unnecessary material. 

Rule 2: Delete redundant material. 

Rule 3: Compose a word to replace a list of items. 

Rule 4: Compose a word to replace individual parts of an action. 

Rule 5: Select a topic sentence. 

Rule 6: Invent a topic sentence if one is not available. 

Through teacher modeling, group practice, and individual practice, students 
learn to apply these rules to create brief summaries of text. 

Other approaches to summarizing text are more holistic. One that 
has been the subject of research is the GIST procedure (Cunningham, 
1982). In GIST, students create summaries of 15 or fewer words for increasingly 
large amounts of text, beginning with single sentences and 
working incrementally to an entire paragraph. As Cunningham describes 
it, GIST is conducted first as a whole class, then in small groups, 
and finally on an individual basis. 

Working with sixth-grade students, Bean and Steenwyk (1984) studied 
the effectiveness of McNeil and Donants set of rules procedure and 
Cunninghams GIST procedure. They found that versions of both approaches 
were effective not only in improving students written summaries 
of text, but also in improving their comprehension of text as 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 221 


measured by a standardized test. Despite being markedly different, the 
two approaches were roughly equal in their effectiveness, and both were 
superior to a control technique that involved only practice in writing 
summaries based on the main ideas in text. 

Perhaps one of the reasons why both McNeil and Donants and 
Cunninghams summary procedures are effective is that they are both 
consistent with an overall model of text processing that itself has stood 
the test of validation: Kintsch and Van Dijks (1978) model of text comprehension 
posits that text is understood through a series of identifiable 
mental operations. These operations are necessary for understanding 
both the local and the more global meaning of text within the constraints 
of working memory, the readers goals, and the structure of the text. 
Although a thorough description of these operations is beyond the scope 
of this chapter, they essentially involve a series of deletions, inferences, 
and generalizations, much like those required by the summarizing procedures 
later used by McNeil and Donant. 

Questions/questioning. No comprehension activity has a longer or more 
pervasive tradition than asking students questions about their reading, 
whether this occurs before, during, or after the reading (see Durkin, 
1978, for compelling evidence of the ubiquity of this practice). We also 
know much about the effect of asking different types of questions on 
students understanding and recall of text, with the overall finding that 
students understanding and recall can be readily shaped by the types of 
questions to which they become accustomed (the classic review is 
Anderson & Biddle, 1975, but see also Levin & Pressley, 1981; Pressey, 
1926; Rickards, 1976). Thus, if students receive a steady diet of factual 
detail questions, they tend, in future encounters with text, to focus their 
efforts on factual details. If teachers desire recall of details, this is a clear 
pathway to shaping that behavior. If, by contrast, more general or more 
inferential understanding is desired, teachers should emphasize questions 
that provide that focus. When students often experience questions 
that require them to connect information in the text to their knowledge 
base, they will tend to focus on this more integrative behavior in the future 
(e.g., Hansen, 1981). 

Although the impact of questions on comprehension is important, 
for our purposes, the more interesting questions are (a) whether students 
can learn to generate their own questions about text and (b) what impact 
this more generative behavior might have on subsequent comprehension. 
The research on engaging students in the process of generating 

222 Duke and Pearson 


questions about the texts they read, although not definitive, is generally 
positive and encouraging (see Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996, 
for a review). Raphael and her colleagues (Raphael & McKinney, 1983; 
Raphael & Pearson, 1985; Raphael & Wonnacott, 1985) carried out 
perhaps the most elaborate line of work on question generation in 
the mid-1980s. Using a technique called QARs (Question-Answer-
Relationships), Raphael and her colleagues modeled and engaged students 
in the process of differentiating the types of questions they could 
ask of text. Students learned to distinguish among three types of questions: 
(1) Right There QARs were those in which the question and the answer 
were explicitly stated in the text, (2) Think and Search QARs had 
questions and answers in the text, but some searching and inferential text 
connections were required to make the link, and (3) On My Own QARs 
were those in which the question was motivated by some text element 
or item of information, but the answer had to be generated from the students 
prior knowledge. Through a model of giving students ever-
increasing responsibility for the question generation, Raphael and her 
colleagues were able to help students develop a sense of efficacy and confidence 
in their ability to differentiate strategies in both responding to 
and generating their own questions for text. 

Later research by Yopp (1988) indicated that when students learn to 
generate questions for text, their overall comprehension improves. In a 
variation that wedded the logic of QARs with the work on story schemas 
(e.g., Singer & Donlan, 1982), Yopp studied three different groups that 
varied in terms of who was taking the responsibility for question generation. 
In the first group, the teacher asked the questions; in the second, 
the students generated their own; in the third, the students generated 
their own and were provided with a metacognitive routine (in the manner 
of QAR) for answering their own questions. The second and third 
groups performed better on posttests given during instruction and after 
the instruction had ended, suggesting that student control of the 
questioning process is a desirable instructional goal. Furthermore, although 
it did not translate into higher performance on the comprehension 
assessments, the third group, those who received the additional 
metacognitive routine, were better at explaining the processes they used 
to answer questions. 

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the efficacy of teaching 
students to generate their own questions while reading comes from the 
research cited in the subsequent section in which we move from 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 223 


individual strategies to comprehension routines. The three routines 
describedreciprocal teaching, transactional strategies instruction, and 
Questioning the Authorare all research-based approaches to teaching 
comprehension that, as a part of their overall approach, teach students 
how to ask questions about text. That the question-generation strategy 
works so well as part of a larger and more comprehensive routine suggests 
that when it is implemented in classrooms, it is probably better to 
use it not as a steady routine repeated for every text encountered, but as 
an activity that is regularly but intermittently scheduled into guided or 
shared reading. 

Summary of the six individual comprehension strategies. To summarize, 
we have identified six individual comprehension strategies that research 
suggests are beneficial to teach to developing readers: prediction/prior 
knowledge, think-aloud, text structure, visual representations, summarization, 
and questions/questioning. Although somewhat different terminology 
is used, these strategies were also identified by the recent 
National Reading Panel (NRP) report (2000), commissioned by the U.S. 
Congress to evaluate research in the area of beginning reading. The NRP 
report also identified Comprehension Monitoring and Cooperative 
Learning as effective comprehension strategies. We address comprehension 
monitoring to some degree in the section covering think-aloud. 
We view cooperative learning as an instructional medium rather than a 
comprehension strategy, and therefore have not included it in our analysis. 
However, the assumption of collaborative work among students and 
between the teacher and students is implicit in the overall approach to 
comprehension we recommend in the first section of this chapter, as well 
as in the comprehension routines discussed later. 

A great deal of research suggests that vocabulary and comprehension 
are inextricably linked. Thus, strategies related to ascertaining the meaning 
of unknown words, as well as general vocabulary building, are also essential 
to a strong program in comprehension instruction. 

Effective Comprehension Routines 

In this section we move from individual strategieshighly specific 
processes that might be embedded into essentially any discussion of 
text and combined with other strategiesto what we have termed comprehension 
routines.By using the term routine,we mean to capture the 

224 Duke and Pearson 


idea of an integrated set of practices that could be applied regularly to 
one text after another, and in the process, provide students with two benefits: 
(1) better understanding of the texts to which the routines are applied, 
and (2) the development of an infrastructure of processes that will 
benefit encounters with future text, especially texts that students must 
negotiate on their own. One of these routines, transactional strategies instruction, 
borders on being a complete comprehension curriculum. We 
have chosen to focus on three routinesreciprocal teaching, transactional 
strategies instruction, and Questioning the Author (QtA) 
although there are other research-tested practices that might be 
characterized also as routines, such as the Directed Reading-Thinking 
Activity (DR-TA) (e.g., Baumann et al., 1992) and Informed Strategies 
for Learning (Paris, Cross, & Lipson, 1984). 

Reciprocal teaching. Four comprehension strategiespredicting, questioning, 
seeking clarification, and summarizingare the focus of the reciprocal 
teaching approach. Originally developed by Annemarie Palincsar 
(1982; also Brown & Palincsar, 1985; Palincsar & Brown, 1984), reciprocal 
teaching involves a gradual release of responsibility from teacher to 
student for carrying out each part of the routine. In the early stages of the 
reciprocal teaching, the teacher does much modeling of the target comprehension 
strategies. In some versions of reciprocal teaching, this includes 
direct teaching of each individual strategy and the use of 
worksheets for practice strategies (e.g., Palincsar, Brown, & Martin, 1987). 
As time goes on, students assume increasing control over strategy use, 
eventually using the strategies with little or no teacher support. 

A typical reciprocal teaching session begins with a review of the main 
points from the previous sessions reading, or if the reading is new, predictions 
about the text based on the title and perhaps other information. 
Following this, all students read the first paragraph of the text silently to 
themselves. A student assigned to act as teacher then (a) asks a question 
about the paragraph, (b) summarizes the paragraph, (c) asks for clarification 
if needed, and (d) predicts what might be in the next paragraph. 
During the process, the teacher prompts the student/teacher as needed, 
and at the end provides feedback about the student/teachers work. 

Reciprocal teaching sessions are intended to take approximately 30 
minutes, and they can include more than one student in the role of 
teacher each session. Although typically conducted in small groups, reciprocal 
teaching has been conducted in one-to-one and whole-group 
formats. The approach has been used with both good and struggling 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 225 


readers. The following dialogues come from reciprocal teaching sessions 
with students struggling with the technique: 

T: 
What would be a good question about pit vipers that starts with the 
word why? 
S: 
(No response) 
T: How about, Why are the snakes called pit vipers? 
 
S: 
How do spinners mate is smaller than.... How am I going to say that? 
T: 
Take your time with it. You want to ask a question about the spinners 
mate and what he does, beginning with the word how. 
S: 
How do they spend most of his time sitting? 
T: 
Youre very close. The question would be How does the spinners 
mate spend most of his time? Now you ask it. 
 


T: 
That was a fine job, Ken, but I think there might be something to 
add to our summary. There is more information that I think we 
need to include. This paragraph is mostly about what? 
S: 
The third method of artificial evaporation. (Palincsar & Brown, 
1984, p. 138) 
This next dialogue comes from a first-grade class employing reciprocal 
teaching. 

S1: My question is, what does the aquanaut need when he goes under 
water? 
S2: A watch. 
S3: Flippers. 
S4: A belt. 
S1: Those are all good answers. 
T:` Nice job! I have a question too. Why does the aquanaut wear a belt? 
What is so special about it? 
S3: Its a heavy belt and keeps him from floating up to the top again. 

T: Good for you. 
S1: For my summary now: This paragraph was about what aquanauts 
need to take when they go under the water. 
S5: And also about why they need those things. 


226 Duke and Pearson 


S3: I think we need to clarify gear. 

S6: Thats the special things they need. 

T: 
Another word for gear in this story might be equipment, the equipment 
that makes it easier for the aquanauts to do their job. 
S1: I dont think I have a prediction to make. 


T: 
Well, in the story they tell us that there are many strange and wonderful 
creatures that the aquanauts see as they do their work. My 
prediction is that theyll describe some of these creatures. What are 
some of the strange creatures you already know about that live in the 
ocean? 
S6: Octopuses. 
S3: Whales? 
S5: Sharks! 


T: 
Lets listen and find out. Wholl be our teacher? (Palincsar & Brown, 
1986, p. 771) 
The important role of the teacher as guide is evident throughout the 
dialogues. In addition to the modeling and scaffolding represented here, 
the teacher routinely reminds students of why these strategies are important 
and how they will help students in their reading. 

Many studies have investigated the effectiveness of reciprocal teaching. 
Rosenshine and Meister (1994) reviewed 16 studies of the technique 
and concluded that reciprocal teaching is effective at improving comprehension 
of text. This was evident from both experimenter-developed 
comprehension tests and, to a lesser extent, from standardized tests of 
comprehension. In another review of research on the approach, Moore 
(1988) also found reciprocal teaching to be effective across multiple 
studies. Reciprocal teaching has been compared with many other approaches 
to comprehension instruction, including teacher modeling 
alone, explicit instruction and worksheets alone, daily practice at reading 
test passages and answering accompanying questions, and training at 
locating information to address different kinds of comprehension 
questions. In all cases, reciprocal teaching was found to be a more effective 
approach. (An innovation on reciprocal teaching known as 
Collaborative Strategic Reading [CSR] has also been shown to be effective 
in multiple research studies, including studies of the approachs 
effectiveness with English Language Learners. For more information 
about this approach, see Klinger and Vaughn [1999].) 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 227 


Students Achieving Independent Learning (SAIL) and other transactional 
strategies approaches. The Students Achieving Independent 
Learning, or SAIL, program also teaches a package of comprehension 
strategies. Used in Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, strategies emphasized 
in SAIL include predicting, visualizing, questioning, clarifying, 
making associations (e.g., between the text and the students experiences), 
and summarizing (Pressley et al., 1994). Use of these strategies is taught 
through teacher think-aloud and explicit instruction. Students practice 
the strategies in various settings, with an emphasis on student interpretation 
of text. Indeed, SAIL and a similar program used at the Benchmark 
School in Media, Pennsylvania, USA, have been characterized as transactional 
strategies instruction because of their emphasis on transactions 
among teacher, student, and text (Pressley et al., 1992). 

In SAIL, the emphasis is on helping students learn when to use which 
comprehension strategies. The program uses a range of different kinds of 
texts that are often quite challenging for students because they are at or 
above grade level. Consider this summary of a SAIL lesson from a 
fourth-grade classroom: 

 Teacher asks students to write a prediction about what the book will 
be about based on its cover. 
 Teacher begins reading the book, thinking aloud as she reads (e.g., 
I wonder if that is the Georgetown in Washington, D.C.; August 
must be the name of a person). 
 Students take turns reading aloud. As students read, the teacher cues 
students to apply strategies as appropriate (e.g., Tell us what has 
been going on here). 
 Students spontaneously employ strategies they have learned in previous 
work, including seeking clarification, relating the text to their 
lives, and visualizing (e.g., I can see a...). 
 Students return to their written predictions to assess their accuracy. 
As this summary suggests, there is not a predetermined sequence of 
strategies to use in SAIL lessons. Rather, strategy use depends on the 
situation; students must coordinate their repertoire of comprehension 
strategies. Also, more attention is given to individual interpretation of 
text than to right answers. Figure 10.4 lists the menu of strategies that 
can be used in transactional strategies instruction. Two features of the 
list are worth noting: First, it incorporates all the strategies within 

228 Duke and Pearson 


Figure 10.4. Basic components of transactional strategies 
instruction 

Cognitive Strategies Interpretive Strategies 

Thinking aloud Character development 
Imagining how a character might feel 
Identifying with a character 

Constructing images Creating themes 
Summarizing Reading for multiple meanings 
Predicting (prior knowledge activation) Creating literal/figurative distinctions 
Questioning Looking for a consistent point of view 
Clarifying Relating text to personal experience 
Story grammar analysis Relating one text to another 
Text structure analysis Responding to certain text features such as 

point of view, tone, or mood 

Strategies in italics are also a part of reciprocal teaching. 

reciprocal teaching (on the cognitive side of the ledger). Second, the list 
is long enough to guarantee selective application (based on the text and 
the learning context) to any given text. There is no way that a teacher 
could ensure that each strategy was applied to every text encountered 
by a group of students. 

Much of the research on SAIL and its intellectual cousin, transactional 
strategies instruction, has been qualitative, looking in detail at the ways 
that strategies are taught and learned. These studies suggest that SAIL and 
similar programs offer a promising approach to comprehension instruction, 
with rich, motivating interactions around text and increasing sophistication 
of student strategy use over time. One quasi-experimental 
study of SAIL has confirmed the effectiveness of the approach at improving 
student comprehension (Brown, Pressley, Van Meter, & Schuder, 
1996). In the study, second-grade students in SAIL classrooms outperformed 
students in comparable non-SAIL classrooms on standardized 
measures of both reading comprehension and word attack. Students in 
SAIL classrooms also remembered more content from their daily lessons 
than students in non-SAIL classrooms. Additional evidence for the efficacy 
of this family of transactional strategy instruction routines can be 
found in Pressleys (1998) recent review. 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 229 


Questioning the Author. Beginning in the early 1990s, Isabel Beck and 
Margaret McKeown, along with a group of colleagues at the University 
of Pittsburgh and in the surrounding schools, began work on a comprehension 
routine called Questioning the Author (QtA). Inspired by 
their own insights (see Beck, McKeown, Sandora, & Worthy, 1996, 

p. 386) in revising text to make it more considerate (Beck, McKeown, & 
Gromoll, 1989), Beck and her colleagues bootstrapped this approach to 
engaging students with text. The idea was that if they, as knowledgeable 
adult readers, found the process of trying to figure out what authors 
had in mind in writing a text in a certain way helpful, perhaps students 
would benefit from querying the author in a similar spirit. Hence, they 
developed a set of generic questions that could be asked as a teacher 
and group of students made their way through a text. The essential approach 
is to query a text collaboratively, section by section, with questions 
like those listed in Figure 10.5 as a guide. 
Figure 10.5. Questions to guide the discussion in Questioning 
the Author 

Goal Candidate Questions 

Initiate the discussion 

Help students focus on the authors 
message 

Help students link information 

Identify difficulties with the way the 
author has presented information or 
ideas 

Encourage students to refer to the text 
either because theyve misinterpreted a 
text statement or to help them recognize 
that theyve made an inference 

 What is the author trying to say? 
 What is the authors message? 
 What is the author talking about? 
 That is what the author says, but what 
does it mean? 
 How does that connect with what the 
author already told us? 
 What information has the author added 
here that connects to or fits in with...? 
 Does that make sense? 
 Is that said in a clear way? 
 Did the author explain that clearly? Why 
or why not? Whats missing? What do we 
need to figure out or find out? 
 Did the author tell us that? 
 Did the author give us the answer to that? 
230 Duke and Pearson 


The expectation is that students who receive this sort of approach to 
text inquiry will develop improved understanding of the texts to which 
the routine is applied, improved understanding of texts they meet on 
their own at a later time, and most important, a critical disposition toward 
texts in general. Ideally, this approach will help students to entertain 
the possibility that a comprehension failure may have as much to do 
with the authors failure to provide a considerate message as it does with 
the failure of the reader to bring appropriate cognitive and affective resources 
to bear in trying to understand it. 

The data on the efficacy of Questioning the Author (Beck et al., 1996) 
are encouraging. First, with the support of a professional community, 
teachers can learn to transform their text discussions from traditional 
recitations to these more student-centered, interpretive, and decidedly 
critical discussions. Second, when the routine is implemented, students 
assume a greater role in the overall text discussions, nearly doubling their 
piece of the discussion pie (compared with traditional discussions), and 
they initiate many more interactions. Third, and most important, students 
become much more successful at higher order comprehension and 
monitoring their comprehension as a result of participating in 
Questioning the Author. It is equally empowering to teachers and students. 
Those who wish to implement this approach should consult the 
works that Beck and her colleagues have written for classroom teachers 
(Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997). 

Where Will Comprehension Research Go? 
Some Challenges 

There are many who believe that the kind of intense attention that has 
been aimed at issues of decoding, particularly in recent years, will soon 
turn to comprehension. Although this is desirable in terms of bringing 
attention to an often quiet literature and increasing the extent to which 
teachers, parents, and administrators think about how they teach (or 
fail to teach) comprehension, it is worrisome in light of the character of 
the decoding debates. Questions that worry us include the following: 

 Will comprehension be understood in all of its complexity? 
Even the brief description at the beginning of the chapter of 
what good readers do when they read makes it clear that comprehension 
is complex. It has been difficult to convince many that decoding 
entails more than simply letter-by-letter sounding out. It 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 231 


may also be difficult to convince many that comprehension is more 
than just listening to the words you decode to see if they make 
sense, and that it involves many different processes, that it entails a 
multiplicity of different strategies, and that it means different things 
in different contexts. 

 Will we acknowledge that comprehension-learning is different for 
different people? 
Awareness of individual differences continues to be lacking in 
much discourse on decoding. Will it be lacking in discourse on 
comprehension? Will we come to terms with the notion that effective 
comprehension requires different kinds and amounts of instruction 
and experiences for different learners? 

 Will our definition and fundamental understanding of comprehension 
keep pace with the changing nature of text? 
We still tend to characterize comprehension of text, and reading 
in general, as a linear process. This is true even though we know 
that good readers, whether adults or children, do not read even traditional 
texts linearly. Readers routinely skip ahead to sections of a 
text that they believe are most relevant to their reading goals or return 
to reread sections they first encountered much earlier in the 
reading. Some texts, such as computer manuals, magazines, and 
cookbooks, are almost never read from front to back. Even novels, 
although often read front to back, are sometimes read nonlinearly. 
A reader recently described to one of us how he usually skips the descriptive 
parts of each chapter, but returns to them if he gets the 
feeling he has missed an important detail. With the growing use of 
hypertext, Web links, and texts that are really webs of many loosely 
coupled but independently generated texts, increasingly more material 
will have to be read in a nonlinear style. In the future, text navigation 
may be linked with text comprehension. 

 Will we question long-held or favorite assumptions about effective 
reading comprehension instruction? 
For example, we are guilty of routinely recommending that students 
read real texts for real purposes in the course of their reading 
comprehension instruction, although there is little or no 
research to support this recommendation directly. Research certainly 
shows that children can develop strong comprehension using 
authentic texts, but there is little or no research investigating 
whether, for example, reading comprehension skills develop better 

232 Duke and Pearson 


or more quickly when students are reading authentic texts rather 
than texts written solely for comprehension instruction. There is 
also little or no research investigating whether reading comprehension 
abilities develop better when students are reading texts for 
reasons that go beyond simply learning to read. We suspect (indeed 
we believe) that both genuine texts and authentic purposes are 
important aspects of quality comprehension instruction, and in the 
face of missing evidence, we will continue to recommend both, but 
neither can be unequivocally recommended with the force of compelling 
empirical evidence. 


 Will we ask questions about the optimal numbers and kinds of 
comprehension strategies to teach? 
As noted throughout this chapter, we now know of a number 
of effective strategies, but we also suspect that there is a point of 
diminishing returns. If two well-taught, well-learned strategies are 
better than one, are three better than two, four better than three, 
and so on? Again, the field could continue to focus on developing 
additional effective strategies, but perhaps our attention is better focused 
on refining and prioritizing the strategies we already have. 


 Will we ask the tough questions about reading comprehension 
instruction? 
In 1978, Dolores Durkin published her famous (perhaps infamous) 
study documenting the paucity of comprehension instruction 
and explicit strategy explanations in elementary classrooms. As 
our review documents, in the last 20 years we have learned a lot 
about how to ameliorate the situation Durkin found. Even so, later 
studies in the 1980s and 1990s have suggested that there is little reading 
comprehension instruction in schools (e.g., Pressley & Wharton-
McDonald, 1998). We need to understand why many teachers do not 
focus directly on comprehension strategies and routines, and we 
need to learn more about how to help teachers provide good comprehension 
instruction. A central question is, How can and should 
teachers embed all these research-documented practices into a curriculum? 
It is one thing to demonstrate that if a comprehension 
strategy is taught systematically over, say, a 10-week period, students 
will benefit in terms of strategy acquisition, text comprehension, 
or even standardized test achievement. It is quite another to 
figure out how to curricularize that strategy, along with all the 
other research-proven strategies that might present themselves to a 


Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 233 


teacher or a district curriculum committee for regular inclusion into 
the reading program. Although each of the individual strategies and 
routines we have discussed represents an admirable addition to the 
comprehension curriculum, none could serve as the sole activity students 
encountered day after day, selection after selection. 

Thus, providing some variety both within and among selections 
makes sense. We have little research, however, on optimal combinations 
and distributions of various strategies over time. The closest we come 
to any definitive research on this question is with Transitional Strategies 
Instruction, which is portrayed by its developers more as a menu of activities 
from which a teacher could select than as a subset of strategies 
most appropriate for a particular story, book, or selection. In terms of 
research, it would be useful to complement our knowledge of the effectiveness 
of strategies when they are taught in special units with knowledge 
of their value added to a comprehension curriculum. Without 
finding better ways of bringing effective comprehension instruction to 
classrooms, continued research refining particular comprehension instruction 
techniques will provide little or no real value. 

These difficult questions must be addressed by teachers, teacher educators, 
and reading researchers. The stakes are too high to leave them 
unanswered and unaddressed. In the meantime, however, we can take 
some comfort in the knowledge that for the teacher who wants to work 
directly with students to help them develop a rich repertoire of effective 
comprehension strategies, the tools are available. We know a great deal 
about how to help students become more effective, more strategic, more 
self-reliant readers. It is time that we put that knowledge to work. 

Summary 

In this chapter, we have described effective individual and collective 
strategies for teaching comprehension of text and discussed characteristics 
of a balanced comprehension program into which such strategies 
could be embedded. In Figure 10.6, we offer a tool for assessing the comprehension 
instruction environment in your own classroom. We hope 
that this will aid readers in identifying both strengths and weaknesses 
in comprehension instruction as well as serving as a summary of the material 
presented in this chapter. We hope it will not prove overwhelming, 
even to those who are novices at comprehension instruction. Realize 
that the use of even one of the techniques described in this chapter has 

234 Duke and Pearson 


Figure 10.6. A checklist for assessing the comprehension 
environment and instruction in the classroom 

About the overall reading program 

 How much time do students spend actually reading? 
 How much reading do students routinely do in texts other than those written solely 
for reading or content area instruction? 
 Do students have clear and compelling purposes in mind when reading? 
 How many different genres are available to students within your classroom? How 
many students read across genres? 
 Do students have multiple opportunities to develop vocabulary and concept knowledge 
through texts? 
Through discussion of new ideas? 
Through direct instruction in vocabulary and concepts? 
 Are students given substantial instruction in the accurate and automatic decoding of 
words? 
 How much time do students spend writing texts for others to comprehend? 
With reading-writing connections emphasized? 
 Are students afforded an environment rich in high-quality talk about text? 
About comprehension strategy instruction 

 Are students taught to... 
_ identify their purpose for reading? 
_ preview texts before reading? 
_ make predictions before and during reading? 
_ activate relevant background knowledge for reading? 
_ think aloud while reading? 
_ use text structure to support comprehension? 
_ create visual representations to aid comprehension and recall? 
_ determine the important ideas in what they read? 
_ summarize what they read? 
_ generate questions for text? 
_ handle unfamiliar words during reading? 
_ monitor their comprehension during reading? 
 Does instruction about these strategies include 
_ an explicit description of the strategy and when it should be used? 
_ modeling of the strategy in action? 
_ collaborative use of the strategy in action? 
_ guided practice using the strategy, with gradual release of responsibility? 
_ independent practice using the strategy? 
About other teaching considerations 

 Are students helped to orchestrate multiple strategies, rather than using only one at a 
time? 
 Are the texts used for instruction carefully chosen to match the strategy and students 
being taught? 
 Is there concern with student motivation to engage in literacy activities and apply 
strategies learned? 
 Are students comprehension skills assessed on an ongoing basis? 
Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 235 


been shown to improve students comprehension of text. In fact, in the 
previous edition of this book, Pearson suggested that comprehension instruction 
is best when it focuses on a few well-taught, well-learned 
strategies. Although we can now point to a litany of effective techniques, 
that does not mean that using a litany of techniques will be effective. 

Questions for Discussion 

1. In this chapter we have argued that there is considerable research 
on effective comprehension instruction, but that much of this 
research is not reflected in classroom practice. Based on your 
experience in schools and classrooms, do you agree? If so, why do 
you think that this is the case? 
2. Comprehension is addressed in a number of commercial reading 
programs. With respect to comprehension instruction, what would 
you be looking for in evaluating these programs? 
3. Arrange to observe comprehension instruction in a local school and 
classroom. What do you see as relative strengths and weaknesses 
of comprehension curriculum and instruction in this classroom? 
4. We suggest several challenges for future research on comprehension. 
Which of these do you believe is most salient and why? 
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OTHER RESOURCES 

The reference section includes references to many books, chapters, and 
articles that address specific comprehension strategies and approaches to 

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 241 


teaching them. There are also references to several reviews of research. 
For more comprehensive discussions of comprehension instruction 
written specifically for teachers, you might consult any of the following 
recently published books on the topic: 

Blachowicz, C., & Ogle, D. (2001). Reading comprehension: Strategies for independent 
learners. New York: Guilford. 
Block, C.C., & Pressley, M. (Eds.) (2001). Comprehension instruction: Research-based best 
practices. New York: Guilford. 
Keene, E.O., & Zimmerman, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought: Teaching comprehension in a 
readers workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 

242 Duke and Pearson 


